Reference annotations enables teams to add contextual information directly to their analytics charts to explain metric trends and share historical context with team members. Use Reference annotations to track app launches, sales events, bug fixes, and other significant events that may impact your metrics.

Eligibility and guidelines

Team members with analytics access can create and manage reference annotations as long as your team meets the following criteria:

An active developer account on the Meta Horizon platform

At least one published app with access to analytics

Annotation guidelines:

Annotations are displayed at an app level - once created, everyone in your team with app access will see the same annotations

Any user with analytics access can add, edit, or manage annotations created by others on the team

Individual users can hide annotations without affecting visibility for other team members

Meta-created annotations may appear on your charts to denote platform-wide events like OS releases or service issues

Getting started

Navigate to your app and select Analytics from the left-side navigation

Go to any analytics page with time series charts (Revenue, User Engagement, Performance, etc.)

Click the manage annotations button at the top right of all pages that support annotations. This will open a side panel where you can manage annotations and update your annotation preferences.

Select + Add to create your first reference annotation. This will open an annotation form to fill out.

Complete the annotation form with title, date range, and description. Choose which charts should display this annotation.

Save to make the annotation visible to your team.

A “Note” flag will be added to any chart where the annotation is attached. The flag will appear at the annotation’s start date. If the annotation’s start date is earlier than the chart’s selected date range, the flag will instead appear at the start of the graph, so you can still see the annotation’s presence within the visible range.

In addition, a detail card for the annotation will be shown in the Manage annotations sidebar. This sidebar provides a view of all annotations that intersect with the currently selected date range on the page. If an annotation’s date range overlaps in any way with the selected date range, it will be included in the list.

Hover over the Note flag to see the annotation’s date range highlighted and on the chart. A tooltip will also appear, displaying key details similar to those shown in the detail card: the title, description, date range, the user alias of the creator or last editor, and the date it was last updated.

Interaction and visualization

Chart markers

Annotations appear as visual markers on your analytics charts. If multiple annotations share the same start date, the flag will display “Note (x)”, where x is the total number of annotations for that date. If an annotation begins before the chart’s start date but ends within the chart’s date range, it will still be shown on the chart, with its flag positioned at the start of the chart.

When you hover the mouse over annotation flags they display tooltip with additional information. annotations with end dates highlight the affected time period on charts

When you click annotation flags, it opens the View annotation sidebar, which lists all annotations for that start date. From this sidebar, you can review detailed information for each annotation and also edit or delete them as needed.

Annotation types

Currently, there are two annotation types:

Team annotations: Custom annotations created by your team for app-specific events. These annotations will be displayed in blue.

Meta annotations: Platform-level annotations created by Meta for data issues

These data issue annotations will be displayed in red. And marked as created by Meta.

User preferences

Using the dropdown, you can choose which charts display annotations and which types of annotations to show. These selections update both the annotations shown on the charts and those listed in the Annotations sidebar.

Chart level

You can hide or show annotations directly from the chart using the chart’s overflow menu.

Example table with reference annotations and fictional data

Note: Your preferences are automatically saved and persist across sessions. If all options are deselected, no annotations will be displayed on the page until the preferences are updated.

Managing annotations

Creating custom annotations

Custom annotations created by your team for app-specific events

From chart actions: Use the expandable menu on any time series chart to add annotations

Via manage annotations sidebar: Access the comprehensive annotation management panel

Editing and deleting annotations

From the chart: Click on the Note flag to open the View sidebar

This opens a sidebar displaying detail cards for all annotations with the same start date. Each detail card includes options to edit or delete annotations.

When an annotation is updated, the label will change from “Created by <user alias> on <create date>” to “Updated by <user alias> on <update date>”

Via manage annotations sidebar: Access the comprehensive annotation management panel

Click the “Manage annotations” button (notebook icon) in the top right corner of the analytic’s page

This will display detail cards for all annotations that fall within the page’s selected date range. Each detail card will have options for edit and delete similar to above.

Note: All team members can edit or delete existing annotations